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Story Ideas – From an Old School’s Demise
By Deb Gallardo
One of the advantages and disadvantages of living at least half a century is that you see for yourself this truism: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” This post may, at first glance, seem like just another trip down memory lane. But stay with me. Memories are powerful and can provide you with any number of story ideas, each of which could take you in countless directions.
Let my nostalgia and reaction to losing my old schools take you back to your own school days. This is only appropriate given the time of year we’re in when kids are either heading back to school or have already started the 2008-2009 school year.
So put on vintage music and let your mind drift to a simpler time. Smell the aromas of freshly-waxed floors, of new textbooks, of popcorn and hotdogs at the sports concession, of the sweaty locker room, of unflushed toilets and dripping sinks, of stall doors that don’t quite close where girls run to cry their hearts out when their one true love becomes untrue. Feel the grooves in the steps where decades of students have worn down stone or concrete from their passage up and down the school’s staircases.
Go back with me and remember. BE there. LIVE it. BREATHE it. HEAR it. FEEL it. KNOW it. All over again.
When I first moved to this small, Central Ohio farming community in the mid-1950′s, the local school system had a new 5-module elementary campus that serviced Kindergarten through fourth grade, and the original school building that housed grades 5-12. This building was actually a culmination of three separate building projects that began around 1850.
In the early 1960′s, construction began on a new high school. Doors opened the fall of 1964, the year I was a sophomore. At first the facility housed only grades 10-12, and mine was the first class to spend all three years at the new high school. A few years later freshmen were admitted there. And as the population continued to grow, the building was expanded.
In the early 2000′s the elementary campus was sold following the construction of a new primary school. Building continued until early August of 2008 on middle school and high school wings.
Today, all three sections of the original 19th century schoolhouse are mere rubble, being loaded scoop-by-scoop into trucks and carted away as I write this. The oldest section, made of “white” brick (= yellowish), is meeting its demise differently than the other two. At the auction where the contents of the school were sold, bricks from the oldest section went for $25 each.
The old high school addition is also being demolished. The original grades 10-12 facility now houses the board of education as well as the old high school gym and weight room, plus an annex for the drama club and the spring musical.
Where, you ask, are the students now housed? All grades, K-12 are now housed under one humongous roof. From ONE building for the entire system, to 2 buildings to 3 buildings, we are once again back to ONE building.
Having been a student in all three of the previous facilities, and in recent years substitute teaching at each building, I have feelings of nostalgia about the demise of my old school buildings. Until a month ago, I could walk into my fifth grade classroom and remember where I sat, walk out to the playground to the spot where we used to play tetherball and nearby where the swing set used to be located.
I could walk the halls that, as a little seventh grader, I first navigated through crowds of high school students who seemed so grown up and tall! When I subbed the past 7 years, I picked up my lunch in the same cafeteria that once doubled as a study hall, where I heard the announcement that President Kennedy had been shot. When I assistant-directed our local drama club productions since 2001, I worked in the same gymnasium where I went to my first dance, where I learned to do The Mashed Potato, The Swim, The Monkey and The Twist. I interacted with students in that gym on the very stage where I starred as Ensign Nellie Forbush in “South Pacific” in the spring of 1966.
Through this experience of watching my old school buildings become rubble, I’ve learned that my memories don’t require the buildings to evoke clear recollections. In fact, having come back to this area and teaching in these buildings actually created new memories that supercede the older ones to a large extent. But memories from the distant past are often clearer than, say, what we had for dinner last night, perhaps they will resurface as I grow (still) older, with greater clarity, through the lens of nostalgia.
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